


Little Gold Houses

by BombshellKell



Category: Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 15:13:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/775654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BombshellKell/pseuds/BombshellKell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stories from Asgard, the cutest little gated community in America.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The other tagged relationships and characters will be present in future chapters.

Hilde knocked on Loki’s door with a trembling hand, clutching the handle to her wagon of cookie boxes with the other. Her father had told her countless times that Loki was harmless, that he was only a bit strange, but she didn’t know how he could possibly be right. Even his house was strange, big and dark, with big trees growing all around that hid the windows from view of anyone outside. She guessed that could have been so that he could walk around in his pajamas, the way her mother did when she closed the windows, but the explanations that her friends gave seemed much more likely. Of course, if you were a vampire, you wouldn’t want people looking in and seeing you suck blood from people. That just wouldn’t be right. 

She waited for a minute or so before knocking again, thinking she heard some scuffling and banging around inside. A victim, she thought, trying to run and failing. She was about to turn around and leave, but just when she’d gained the resolve to do so, the door opened, revealing Loki in a black robe and looking slightly disheveled. 

Hilde stared at him. “Y-You ordered some thin mints,” she said, her voice small. 

“That I did.” Loki nodded. “A few weeks ago, wasn’t it?” 

“Yes.” She nodded, looking down at her clipboard, if not only to avoid looking him in the eyes. “Um... two boxes of them. Here.” She turned around and pulled two boxes of thin mints from her wagon, handing them over to him. He went back inside to get his wallet, and Hilde thought for a moment that she heard laughter. Completely taken aback, she shut her mouth tight. She’d expected screams. Calls for help, maybe. But not laughter. 

Loki reappeared after a moment and paid her for the cookies. “Thank you, Hilde. Say hello to your father for me.” 

“I-I will,” she said, nodding. Remembering her manners, she tried to continue the conversation. “He ordered almost twenty boxes.” 

“I’m sure he did.” Loki let out a small chuckle. “Well, I’ve been working nights, so I had better get back to bed. Have a good day.” He shut the door, rather abruptly. Hilde didn’t need another reason to clear out, hastily taking her wagon back up the pathway. 

Inside, Loki put the cookies on the counter and turned his head. Sif leaned up against the doorway, his bed sheet wrapped around her torso, and smiled. 

“That was a close one.” She stepped forward and unwrapped the sheet from her chest, holding the corners of it in her hands and closing it up around him when her arms wound around his shoulders.

“It isn’t as if she’ll find anything odd about your being here,” Loki reminded her, leaning in and giving her a kiss. “She’s still at the age where boys are only friends. She wouldn’t run off to Thor and tell him that his fiancee was having an affair with his brother. For all she knows, you’re here having breakfast.” 

“I do intend to have breakfast while I’m here at some point,” Sif said, laying her head against his chest and using that position to look around the kitchen. “If you have anything. You barely eat.” 

“I eat,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I just don’t eat like you and Thor. Why the two of you don’t look more like Volstagg is beyond me.” 

“Thor is busy fixing things. I’m busy busting people. We burn calories.” She sighed. “But I don’t want to talk about Thor. If I wanted to talk about Thor, I would just go home and listen to him talk about himself all day.” 

“Which is odd of you to say, because when presented with an opportunity to point out my flaws, my self-centeredness is always high on your list.” 

“But at the very least you’re interesting about it.” She turned her head up, smiling.

Loki smiled back, giving her another kiss. “He’s going to expect you home soon. When are you going to let him know that your night shift days are actually your days off?” 

“The same time he figures out that yours and my night shift days tend to coincide,” she answered with a lighthearted shrug. “Probably never.” 

“I don’t understand why we can’t just...” 

She groaned, unwrapping him and wandering back toward the counter. “Not this again. I told you why we can’t just get together, why I can’t just break up with Thor. It’d tear you two apart, tear all of us apart. I don’t want to have to make people choose between you and him.” 

“Are you sure it’s not because you know that they would all choose him?” Loki asked, raising an eyebrow. Sif looked back over her shoulder at him. 

“...I’m going to get dressed,” she said with a sigh. 

“What did I say?” 

“I don’t know why you can’t just let things be as they are. Why everything has to be bigger, better.” 

“If things can be better, why wouldn’t you want them to be?” 

“Because it wouldn’t be better for everyone,” she said, bunching the sheet up in her hands and walking back upstairs. Loki followed her up with his eyes until he couldn’t see her anymore. As far as he could see, the only one it wouldn’t be better for was Thor. But if Thor didn’t want something, of course, no one would. He was their fearless leader after all. He wondered if Sif could see that the unspoken laws of their friendship were even stricter and twice as ridiculous as the laws she spent her days upholding with such gusto. 

She never stayed for breakfast.


	2. Chapter 2

Fandral woke up every day at half past noon, ate a bowl of Fruit Loops, and jogged around the block twice. Perhaps the boring way he spent his mornings was meant to make up for the not-so-boring ways he often spent his nights, he thought, as he tucked his iPod into its arm strap and stretched a little before taking off down the driveway. 

Sigyn was kneeling in the grass of her front yard, pulling some weeds from her vastly-growing garden. When Fandral approached, she smiled and waved, watching as he stopped to jog in place in front of her yard. 

“Hey, Sigyn. What’s up?” 

“Hm? Oh, nothing. Just... pulling weeds, you know.” 

“Yeah, I hear they always grow back even after you pull them.” 

“Most of the time.” She giggled. “How’s, er... um... your lady friend?” 

“Which one?” 

“Um, the most recent one.” 

“She’s alright. I don’t think it’s gonna work out, though.” 

“Why not?” 

“She’s not as cute as you.” He winked to make sure she knew he was kidding, and started jogging forward again. She flushed, feeling much warmer than the seventy-something degree air around her, and tugged off her gloves to rub her hands over her face, unable to keep from grinning. Her grin lost a few watts, however, when she saw Loki walking up the street toward her. Fandral jogged by him without so much as a second glance. 

Sigyn straightened up and put on a smile for Loki anyway. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?” she asked, giving him a kiss when he came up to embrace her. “Mr. Night Shift?” 

“I only wanted to say hello. I’ll go back to bed soon, I promise.” 

“Good. Hilde and her friends already think you’re a vampire. You don’t need to look the part, too.” She reached up to push his hair back, to make him look like Dracula. He rolled his eyes. 

“Hilde and her friends think a lot of things that aren’t true. Starting with Santa Clause and ranging all the way to Volstagg routinely telling them he invented various foods. I think last week it was spaghetti.” 

“How do you know he didn’t invent spaghetti? Do you know who did?” 

“I would say someone in Italy.” Loki grinned. “But no, I suppose I don’t know.” 

She smiled and gave his middle a little squeeze. “Go home, go back to bed. Or go in and sleep in my bed. You don’t want to be dead on your feet tonight.” 

“I’m already dead on my feet.” She thought it sounded a bit sad, but it was probably only a joke fallen flat. She stood on her toes to press a kiss to his cheek, and he started walking up her front pathway, his mind made up that he didn’t want to walk all the way back to his house. 

Meanwhile, Fandral had made it on his first loop around the block, and was working on the second. He passed houses he’d been inside multiple times, but none that he’d never been in before. He could recite the colors of each house’s bedsheets, the colors of each wife’s favorite lipstick. 

It was a game he often played with himself while he was jogging. Sometimes the ladies themselves were doing something in their front lawn and waved at him. Sometimes the husbands were there, and would glare at him. Most of the time he would wink at the wives and ignore the husbands. It was so strange to him that everyone knew what sort of person he was, how everyone knew that their wives had cheated on them at least once, but no one seemed to want to do anything about it. 

When he reached his house again, Sigyn was no longer working in the garden. He looked to see if she was sitting on the porch, but she wasn’t there, either. He remembered running past Loki and suddenly knew what she was probably doing. With a soft sigh, he went back into the house and opened a can of beer. Why Sigyn and Loki irritated him so much, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the fact that Sif was Fandral’s best friend, and he knew underneath Sigyn and Loki’s happy relationship there was a whole lot of shit going on, even beyond Loki cheating on her. 

It just felt so stupid that she should have to put up with that when she could have something better.


	3. Chapter 3

That morning wasn’t any different than the others. Fandral hauled himself out of bed, wandered into the kitchen, and sat down to pour the milk into his bowl of Fruit Loops. Except this time, when he sat down, there was someone sitting across from him, holding out a handful of aspirin for his hangover and smiling, red hair tied into a ponytail with a bandana over her shoulder.

“...Marian?” 

“Hi, Fandral,” she said, gently tipping her hand over and letting the pills fall into his. “You haven’t changed.” 

“Neither have you.” He shook his head, leaning back and swallowing the aspirin without anything to drink. “What are you doing here?” 

“Your mother called me. She said she hasn’t heard from you in a few days.” She leaned back in her chair to look him over. “What’s going on?” 

“Nothing’s going on, I just didn’t want to talk to her,” he grumbled, pouring the milk. 

“Fandral, she’s your mother.”

“And just cause she’s adopted you as your surrogate daughter doesn’t change the fact that you dumped me and left overnight. You can’t just come back and expect us to be best friends.” 

“I thought we were more grown up than all of this,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I told you, I want to stay friends with your mother, at least. She was always nice to me, even when my family wasn’t. I think I have a right to stay friends with her. After all, she’s not nearly as mad at me as you are. I apologized to you a long time ago.” 

“And I never said I forgive you,” he pointed out, taking a nonchalant bite of Fruit Loops. 

“Well, whatever’s going on, it’s obviously making you sad. There are like six bottles of beer in the trash can, and you didn’t even make any kind of an effort to hide them.” 

“Well, usually, no one sneaks into my house early in the morning.”

“It’s past noon.” 

“Whatever.” 

“Don’t ‘whatever’ me. I know something’s going on. When we broke up, no one saw you for days, and when they did, it was because you got arrested for indecent exposure and Hogun had to go pick you up from the police station. So start talking.” She leaned her head on her hands, propped up by her elbows on the table. “What is it now? A girl? A job? Your dad?” 

“Nothing. I said it was nothing. And even if it was, what makes you think I’d want to talk to you about it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, right. I wouldn’t. Because you’re just my stupid ex-girlfriend who left me alone with a motel bill and a note saying it wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault. But that’s not the point.” 

“No, that’s exactly the point.” He stood, gesturing over toward the door that led out to the front yard. “You gotta go. I’m gonna go out jogging.” 

She scowled, but finally took the hint, getting up and taking a handful of Fruit Loops from the box. “Alright, fine. But whenever you’re ready to talk...” 

“I’ll talk to Hogun, or Volstagg, or Thor. Not you.” He felt a squeezing sensation in his heart as she watched her walk away from him again, watched her go out the door and shut it behind her. 

He went to the liquor cabinet and poured a splash of vodka into his cereal bowl.


End file.
